SC rejects plea to stay NEET-UG 2025 counselling over alleged answer-key error
Observing that the court will not interfere with a national-level examination that involves careers of thousands of students, a bench of Justices dismissed the petition
eduethicadmin The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a petition to stay the counselling in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test Undergraduate (NEET-UG) 2025 examination due to an alleged error in the answer key released by the National Testing Agency (NTA) last month.
A petition was filed by NEET-UG candidate Shivam Gandhi Raina, pointing out that one of the answers was incorrect according to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook for Class 11 and has not been rectified by the NTA.
Observing that the court will not interfere with a national-level examination that “involves the careers of thousands of students,” a bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and R. Mahadevan said, “You are right, there could be multiple answers, despite that, we will not interfere in a national level examination.”
Senior advocate R. Balasubramanian, appearing for the candidate, stated that the issue involves the student's career and that rectifying the error would result in a five-mark gain, potentially securing admission to a better medical college.
He further pointed out that last year, when similar flaws were brought to the notice of the top court regarding the answer key of NEET, a committee of experts drawn from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) had examined the alleged errors. Based on their recommendations, the results were revised.
“This involves the careers of thousands of students... In the other matter last year, the matter was taken up that led to reforms. There were widespread grievances about the discrepancies and shortcomings over the conduct of the examination that the court had to tackle. We cannot tackle individual examinations. We need to tackle larger reforms,” the bench said.
The court further observed that the case presented last year involved multiple students, whereas the present case is an individual grievance. It also informed the petitioner that the court rejected a similar challenge to the NEET-UG answer key on Thursday.
The petitioner, who scored 565 marks in the NEET-UG 2025 examination—securing an all-India rank of 6,783 and a general category rank of 3,195—stated that he had approached the NTA after the release of the provisional answer key on June 3 to highlight an error. However, the same error was retained in the final results.
